Old Fogey’s Favourites

I mentioned Jackson Browne in passing in my previous post on Francis Cabrel. I then realised I hadn’t posted any of his songs here. To rectify this omission here is my favourite Jackson Browne song, from his album ‘Late for the Sky’. It’s a song about the fleeting and the fragile - youth, joy, life - captured as he watches her dance.  Here’s the final verse, on all we have left to do before we die.

‘Into a dancer you have grown, from a seed somebody else has thrown. Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own. And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go may lie a reason you were alive. But you’ll never know.’

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Francis Cabrel is my favourite contemporary French singer. I like him in the same way I like Jackson Browne, whom he resembles in the quiet reflectivity of his songs.

The song ‘Hors saison’ from his album of the same name, is a man’s melancholy reflections on his surroundings while staying in a seaside town out of season. Seaside towns in the winter have a unique melancholy of their own. If you have stayed in Blackpool during February, as I have, you will know what I mean.

“It’s the silence you notice most,Shutters closed, Old plants still in their boxes on balconies. It must be out of season.

The sea at least carries on the same, Its rollers playing the same tune, Its empty, stubborn [têtue] song, For some stray ghosts huddling inside their hoods. It must be out of season.

The wind pierces these now too long avenues. Someone is looking for an unknown address. The mail overflows the doorsteps of summer houses. It must be out of season.

The town seems to fade behind its salty mists. The sea’s anger is too near. Its torments condemn it to screens of smoke. No-one is coming away from the quay.

You could take everything, walls, gardens, streets. You could put your names above the letter boxes Or perhaps one day people will come back. It must be out of season.

The sea at least carries on the same, Its rollers playing the same tune, Its empty song - where are you? [où es-tu?] - For some stray ghosts huddling inside their hoods. It must be out of season.

The town seems to fade behind its salty mists. The sea’s anger is too near. Its torments condemn it to screens of smoke. No-one is coming away from the quay.”

The song seems to be a sensitive rumination on the look of general sadness that pervades a seaside town in winter, when the holiday makers have gone. However Cabrel makes a small change in the repeat of the verse substituting “où es-tu?” (Where are you?)for “têtue” (stubborn) in the original. It is a small change transforms the meaning of the whole song.

No longer a simple reflection on an empty town in winter. It is a cry of anguish at separation. His “Where are you?” is like Jane Eyre’s anguished cry when she hears Rochester’s voice carried on the wind. From the general it has become specific and personal - and poetic

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Dmitri Shostakovich is a composer I find I have to gird my loins tightly before listening to. But once I have done so I come away feeling tremendously impressed - and moved - Symphonies 5 and 7 in particular. There are many sides to him. There’s a playful, teasing, sardonic side, where he seems to be mocking himself, and us, with an angular, jerky, offbeat music, that you can take or leave. There’s the monumental, sombre, melancholy, tragic side that you get in his greatest symphonies - stark and defiant. The ‘Leningrad’ Symphony No. 7 captures this most heart achingly.

There is also a soft and romantic side. It’s Shostakovich as heir to Rachmaninov. We hear it in his music for ‘The Gadfly’ and here, in the Andante from his second Piano Concerto, the equal of the slow movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. It was always one of ‘Your Hundred Best Tunes’.

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The song is by Ivor Gurney to a poem by the Elizabethan poet, John Fletcher. It’s partly in praise of sleep’s restorative powers, but also, and more disturbingly, about sleep as an escape from melancholy, as if into drugged bliss.

‘Come, sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving/Lock me in delight awhile;/Let some pleasing dream beguile/All my fancies, that from thence/I may feel an influence,All my powers of care bereaving.

Tho’ but a shadow, but a sliding,/Let me know some little joy./We, that suffer long annoy, Are contented with a thought/Thro’ an idle fancy wrought:/O let my joys have some abiding.’

It is sung, beautifully, by Janet Baker, with Martin Isepp at the piano. It is an early recording, from 1966, when she was in her early thirties and her voice fresh and youthful. The original LP was released in England on the Saga bargain budget label. I bought it for ten shillings. Saga made a lot of very interesting recordings at the time - including Janet Baker’s other classic, her first recording of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben. The problem with Saga is that everything was done on a shoestring. They didn’t always get their recordings quite right - in an otherwise good recording you might hear a moment where the sound drops out, or the pitch wavers. And the quality of their vinyl pressings was awful - clicks and pops, and background hiss. I’m glad to say that this recording if from a recent CD re-release - the stereo separation is a bit eccentric.

And wonderful for all that.

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Recorded 50 years ago this week by a small band of Duke Ellington on piano, Johnny Hodges on alto sax, Harry Edison on trumpet, Les Spann guitar, Al Hall bass, Jo Jones on drums.

In an appreciation I wrote here, I summed it up as ‘excellent trumpet from Edison, good aggressive alto from Hodges, eccentric, hamfisted but engaging piano from the Duke, superb drumming from Jones.’ True, but it hardly catches the spirit of this classic performance, by musicians at the top of their game, playing with all the naturalness of players that have the idiom in their bones and nothing to prove to anyone.

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Today is my dear Grandmother’s birthday. She would have been 111 - born, officially, in 1898. But I don’t believe it. She lied about her age - because my Grandfather was born one year later - in 1899. She was worried about the difference in their ages but thought he’d live with one year’s difference, but not more. So he did, and they were married.

A while ago, I came across my Grandmother’s demob records, from when she was in the Land Army during the First World War. These records show that she was born, not in 1898, but in 1896. She must have thought that three years’ difference was too much for my Grandfather to accept - so she lied!

When we were celebrating her 80th birthday in 1978, she secretly knew it was her 82th.

Good for her!

When I was young and they both were old, we used to go to the pub on Saturday night, with the rest of the mob that was my family. My Grandmother would have a ‘Snowball’ - a disgusting drink made of Advocaat (egg yolk and brandy) and lemonade. My Grandfather would have a pint of beer, then a whisky, then several more. Towards the end of the evening, when the whole pub was juiced up and the piano player didn’t care what notes he hit, this was one of the songs that brought beery tears to the eyes of the whole company - Grandmother and Grandfather too.

Here it is - two songs for the price of one - ‘When you and I were young, Maggie’ and ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ -beautifully sung by Stuart Burrows.

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Buddy Holly died fifty years ago today. He was twenty two years old. He had come over to England the year previous and I remember seeing him on TV, with the Crickets, on the family variety performance show ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’. He sang ‘Oh Boy’.

Shortly afterwards I bought my first vinyl LP, ‘The Buddy Holly Story’ on the Coral Record label. I have it here before me. The cover is held together with cellotape, but the record itself is still playable, despite the battering it had over the years on my old Dansette record player.

Buddy Holly was among the first rock’n'roll stars to write their own songs - another was Eddie Cochran, who also died tragically young. Holly’s songs were disarmingly simple - often consisting of no more than three simple chords. But his example - a young man writing songs for people his own age, which they could relate to - gave a lot of singers who came after him the courage to do the same. Lennon and McCartney above all.

In Memoriam.

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